What Does the New President Need to Know?
Making Mideast Peace
Making Mideast Peace
Raymond G. Helmick, S.J.
CSPC, St. Paul Parish, Cambridge, MA
September 28, 2008
I must confess myself rather intimidated at giving the first talk in this series on what the new President needs to know. It is just a wee bit presumptuous for me to tell the President-to-be what he needs to know, that I know and neither he nor any of his advisors do. I have, in fact, more confidence in one of the candidates than the other, not absolute confidence I’m afraid, and you may just be able to guess which one as I go along.
We have had, in my own opinion, a very bleak last seven, nearly eight years under President Bush. About the particular area I’m to speak of, the Israeli-Palestinian part of the Middle East, he determined, from the start of his presidency, that he would have nothing to say, and despite a flurry of activity at the end of his time in office, showy but desultory, he has actually not offered much. His neglect has had poisonous effects.
I am going to have to widen the scope of this first talk in the series somewhat, to include the rest of the Middle East, especially Iraq, and put all of it into the context of the underlying themes of the Bush Administration, things from which, in my own view, we will have to recover in a new presidency, and that are therefore the primary things the new President needs to know.
Let’s start with democracy. President Bush and his Administration have claimed, at least since the reasons he originally gave for invading Iraq have been proven false, that we went there to promote democracy and to make Iraq the shining example of democracy for all the Middle East. Democracy, in any case, has become the critical area for any new President of the United States, for we have departed so drastically from democratic practice in these last years that his most basic task must be one of restoration. In our domestic policy, we require a fundamental restoration of constitutional government, which we have seen trashed over these years. That is not my theme today but I trust that whoever speaks to you on it in this series will recognize that critical need. In our foreign relations, in the Middle East or in fact anywhere in the world, the principal problem facing the United States at this time is that no one in the world can any longer believe anything said by our government.
Trust in our word, in its truthfulness or in any promises our government makes, approaches a zero point, with the result that we no longer have a genuine voice in world affairs that can carry persuasive influence. That leaves us only residual powers of coercion or intimidation, against which even these who have been our closest allies study to defend themselves. Anything coming from here has to be treated with uttermost suspicion. For our Middle East policy, whether in the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab arena, or in Iraq, that means a new President must engage before all else in a program of recovering trust.
Before urging democracy on others we, and the President we elect, must look to the state of it at home here in the United States. We have habitually assumed that democracy was our calling card and that we were the model for it elsewhere in the world. But if we look now at the principal business of the American political system – allow me to call it that, rather than invoking automatically the expression “American democracy” – that principal business has become the transfer of wealth, an upward transfer.
It is strange to be talking of this now, as we experience the meltdown of our national economic system, with dire effects on the world economy, but it is important, as we look at what a new President must understand, to see where this has come from. Disparity of income has come to exceed the pre-depression levels of the 1920s, with the total CEO compensation in large corporations now 275 times the salary of the average worker, up from 35 times in the late 1970s; the proportion of wealth held by the top 1.1% of our population had grown, by the end of last year, to 18.1% of the total wealth of all Americans, up from 14.3% just in 2003.
It is not the first time this has happened. In our history we have seen comparable exponential growth in the disparity of income in the 19th century, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Gilded Age of the 1890s, complete with demeaning conditions of labor and massive suppression of union organization or worker protest. The tide was turned back that time. It was first curbed through the Antitrust legislation introduced by President Theodore Roosevelt and then, in the face of an economic breakdown not unlike our own, totally reversed by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. For some forty years we had a continuing process of the equitable redistribution of wealth, to the great benefit of all our people and, in fact, of the world economy. That was when the United States was greeted with the greatest respect we have encountered in our history.
The new turning of the tables, toward the concentration of wealth, was signaled by the Goldwater campaign of 1964, grew during the 1970s and became the basic pattern of the Reagan years. A principal instrument to put the political system at the service of this objective was to make political campaigns so expensive that hardly anyone could run for any office without first selling out to the holders of corporate wealth. As in the late 19th century, the Party of Lincoln let this become the guiding but largely covert principal of its policy. They masked it in the rhetoric of the free market, which they presented, that alone and in totally unfettered form, as the very definition of democracy. Money did the talking, and was formally admitted as a voice – the predominant voice – in the discourse by judgment of the Supreme Court. There was no genuine political opposition, as the Democratic Party, after losing a few elections, made its peace with this new system, promising that, so long as they got their cut, they would make no trouble.
This entire system rose to a new level with the choice, during the election campaign of 2000, of George Bush as a candidate. He was the choice of the corporate powers, chosen simply because he was so eminently manageable by those who knew which buttons to press. He was given Richard Cheney as a minder, and the real power of decision went to the corporate forces who, once the election was won, briefed the Vice President on how he was to instruct the President at their private lunches on Mondays. One of the greatest governmental disadvantages of this system was that those corporate forces have no idea of long-range policy, but are fixated only on short-range profits. The government, in this administration, fell easy prey to neo-conservative ideology, which cold easily be harnessed to those profit goals. When, by the second Bush term, the neo-cons had become an embarrassment, they were dumped in favor of a policy of muddle, but the contracts kept flowing in to the cosseted corporations.
This is painful material, an index of how much restoration we need from the president we will elect this year. It is encouraging, at least, to see that a similar takeover of government in this country was reversed when it happened before, but for the time being we can hardly be described as a democracy. We have only the vestigial outward symbols of such a system. Possibly the economic meltdown we are now experiencing will have the effect of breaking that toxic control of our lives as did the Great Depression. It is largely a question of whether we now get a Franklin Roosevelt or a Herbert Hoover.
And it is in this context that our country has taken to lecturing the world, and particularly the Middle East, about democracy. Perhaps you wondered if I was ever going to get back to the Middle East, but these are the things a new President needs to know as he approaches the problems he will confront in the Middle East. In our American era of what we might call, by euphemism, “controlled democracy,” everyone in the Middle East has recognized that when they hear the language of democracy used by the American government, such as we have had, the real translation is “subservient government.”
We tend to become fascinated with the external trappings of democracy, with the instruments we use to guard it, so far as we can, among which the principal is elections. But the true inner substance and mark of democracy is accountability. For the truly democratic life of a society, ours or any other, all the power holders must be accountable to those over whom they exercise power. That includes most obviously government, but also such organs of control as the banks and the financial system, corporations etc. We Catholics might remember that it includes church, and while we are accustomed to saying that the Church is not a democratic institution it is obvious that lack of accountability has been a grievous liability of our Church even in very recent years.
While we are often inclined to think of other people as incapable or less capable of democracy than ourselves, different cultures have different ways of requiring accountability of their power holders, different instruments to ensure it. Middle Eastern cultures, for instance, have long had the institution of the majlis, the system by which, at least in theory, every power holder must be open to receive all petitioners in the presence of their peers and before this public to render visible justice in response. The institution is of such importance that its name, majlis, is used in our era of elected legislatures to designate all deliberative bodies. In its pure form it is better suited to smaller jurisdictions than to large national assemblies, but it is prized, used in all the circumstances which can accommodate it and remains, culturally, the model of transparent justice.
Our own politicians, once elected, quite often see it as their next priority to escape from accountability. Our citizens are so little vigilant that commonly, if they are actually presented with accounts of the use their leaders have made of their power, they do not take the trouble to read them, and politicians have learned to keep those accounts unavailable, so complex that they cannot be understood, or presented so late that there is no time for real deliberation to digest them. We’ve been seeing this just lately when, in a pattern that has become familiar, our government waited until the financial crisis had become terribly acute to tell us that the sky was falling and that we must instantly give them massive and unsupervised new powers without taking time for serious deliberation. As usual, this came after years of telling us there was no reason to worry, that all was in good hands and we need not be bothered. Benjamin Franklin, asked by a Pennsylvania lady after the passing of the U.S. Constitution what we had got, a Republic or a Monarchy, answered “a Republic, if you can keep it.”
In Iraq, in Israel and the Palestinian territories, we have looked for those external trappings of democracy that are the most familiar to our own culture, but a free election only qualifies for our approval if the voters have done what we wanted. Elected governments are told that they must do our will or we will treat them as disqualified. This is the subservient government that we have expected of any people we have successfully mastered, of which they are so very wary.
Now that the country is going broke our candidates have largely stopped talking about Iraq. In the candidates’ debate this last week it seemed they were forced, just because it had been the previously announced topic, to distract themselves from the really interesting question of the economy to talk about the war. We had a strong anti-war movement in this country before we invaded Iraq in March 2003. Those of us who were watching closely realized even then that the reasons we were given for the invasion were false. Opposition was even stronger among our allies in Western Europe and we were told by them in the Security Council that they saw no justification for an invasion, for which they would give no approval, and by our then-Pope, John Paul II, that this could not be a just war. Once our armies had swept so easily into Baghdad and our leader told us of the “Mission Accomplished,” the American public, by and large, quieted down and concluded: “Well, we won. So it must have been all right.”
It was no more all right than before, as we have since been learning. Our presidential candidates have been offering, on the one hand, the delusion of victory (we might ask, over what?), and on the other hand the prospect of getting out as swiftly and easily as possible. The inclination to wash our hands of it all will be all the stronger now that our economy is collapsing and we see that all the shattering cost of the war, always kept off-budget, has been raised by borrowings from China which will come back to the next generations as an already insupportable debt.
When the war was still merely looming, early in January 2003 before the invasion, I wrote to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, who I had reason to believe was opposed to the war, using this metaphor: that if we invaded, we would play by the Pottery Barn rules – you break it, you own it. I found later that Powell, late in that month, had a meeting with President Bush in which he used that same metaphor – you break it, you own it – as argument against invading.
I have to concede that candidate Barack Obama, after arguing earlier, when our military situation in Iraq was at its worst, that we should get out as fast as possible – sixteen months has consistently been his formula – has recognized that our departure from Iraq, when it comes, must be “responsible.” Spelling that out, in the heat of the campaign, would doubtless be difficult. We have broken Iraq, very thoroughly. We cannot simply walk away, say “Oops,” and accept no responsibility. We carry a moral responsibility for what we have done, quite apart from the fact that our departure is likely to make things far worse even than our arrival, for ourselves as well as for the Iraqis.
President Bush has had the good fortune to have an extraordinarily competent General, David Petraeus. He has brought the killing down from the astronomical levels of a year ago to something so much lower, though still crushing, that people are congratulating themselves. It isn’t clear which of his twin initiatives is more responsible for that improvement: the surge in American troops or his winning the cooperation of formerly insurgent Sunni tribesmen in the Awakening Councils. Doubtless both figure in the development, as well as the decision by Muqtada al-Sadr to put his private army on hold, or on reserve, for this past year.
All three of these elements are, using the gentle adjective that has become standard to describe it, fragile. The Sadr army, a massive force, is still there and can be launched again at the will of its leader, who has plenty of motive to use it. The Shi’ite government we have helped to power, heavily indebted, to our embarrassment, to Iran, shows signs of attempting to destroy the Awakening movement and its leadership as unwelcome rivals. A civil war between the smaller but more motivated Awakening militias and the larger but less motivated Iraqi Army, mostly Shi’ite, is under preparation. The Kurds, who have been the most cooperative with us and have striven mightily, against the dearest wishes of their people, to stem their separatist leanings and seek their safety, as a people, in a democratically governed Iraq, may yet be driven to separatism by efforts of the Iraqi government to encroach upon them. If so, they will raise a perfect storm throughout the region, where Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria will want to join them in their separatism and will face governments in all those countries which are prepared to destroy them.
Our accomplishments this past year in Iraq are a house of cards. If we are to extricate ourselves from the fruits of our folly without doing yet further harm, we will need to show some wisdom in our dealings with these forces we have loosed against each other. Our capacity for healing relations will be more important than our military capacities.
But here we face the other grave liability that the Bush years (and much that has gone before his time) have left us, that we are without a voice that anyone can believe. And that, among all the puzzles and impasses that will sit on the desk of an incoming President, may be the worst. How can a new President address that?
Now we come, at last, to the Israeli-Palestinian Middle East. More even than the duplicity of our incursion into Iraq, the suspicions about our oil interests and our support of dictatorial regimes which, for their own people, are insupportable, the judgment Middle Eastern people make of us, that the United States cannot be trusted or believed, stems from our long-term mishandling of the Israeli-Palestinian question. No other single thing would more powerfully improve people’s opinion about us than that we should produce positive results for all parties. This was recognized, in fact, by the Baker-Hamilton Commission of two years ago, which recommended serious attention to Israeli-Palestinian peace as a prerequisite for our dealing successfully with the problem we had created for ourselves in Iraq.
Can an American President really have influence in that situation? Sometimes we presume that a President can give directions to the Israelis, and that is mistaken. Israelis have brushed off American instructions frequently, despite any reliance they must have on the support of American power.
This, of course, is the third rail, the taboo subject that any American politician approaches at peril. That part of it none of us needs to tell to either candidate. Both know it so well that they address it with maximum caution, reciting the unquestioning support for anything the most right-wing Israeli government may wish that they feel is mandatory for anyone in American politics. If they could, they would treat the whole Israeli-Palestinian region as a great hole in the map – actually rather a little hole – and say nothing at all.
The assumption is commonly made that to raise this topic at all is anti-Israeli if not actually anti-Semitic. Anyone acquainted with such large organizations as the American Friends of Peace Now, Brit Tzedek (“Covenant of Justice”), the Tikkun communities all across our country (Tikkun Olam, “the Healing of the World”) or the recently established Washington lobby called J Street (named as counterpart to K Street) will understand that a great part, in fact a majority, of the American Jewish community sees that the primary need of the state and society of Israel is for peace, and looks for reconciliation between Israel, the Palestinians and other Arabs.
It is easier to say this out loud in Israel itself than in the United States, where our media never dare to report anything that fails to pass the tests of AIPAC and CAMERA, and our politicians of both parties quake at the thought of incurring the wrath of those organizations. Israelis themselves, of course, while they are much clearer than their American counterparts about their need for constructive work toward peace, dread the appearance of Americans on the scene simply because they have seen so much ham-handed behavior on the part of Americans in the past.
Yet there is no surer way that a new American President could regain trust in the world than to father a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Let there be no assumption that this would mean selling out the Israelis to curry the favor of the Arabs or any others. No American President is going to betray or endanger the Israelis. The worst that could happen, and has happened frequently in the past, is for an American regime to encourage the worst instincts of Israelis and entice them into actions that truly endanger their future. The best that could happen, for the good of the Israelis themselves as well as for Palestinians, is that an American President help both to come to mutual recognition of each other’s needs and rights and live alongside each other in durable peace. The American President who does that will regain the respect and confidence of all the Middle East, including the Israelis, who would be grateful, and of others in the world, including our traditional allies, who have had to reckon with the United States in recent years as a rogue party.
I have spoken of this before here at St. Paul’s and don’t want simply to repeat myself. In fact, at this stage, as we are electing a President who will have to set his priorities once in office, it is more important simply to point to this as a priority area than to try to write the recipes for success. In a book I published four years ago, in 2004 (Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed), I argued that the negotiating process carried on between Israel and the Palestinians, with help from the U.S. and with actual good will on all sides, had suffered a pernicious flaw in that it was pursued without adherence to the requirements of international law. When we don’t act according to law our options are very limited. There is no other way to bring our conflicts to conclusion than by the appeal to power. The side with the most political and military power determines the outcome. The side without it has no real alternative, unless it simply refuses to submit and agrees to suffer the consequences.
The Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process was not played out in quite such overtly brutal language as that. Instead the language was that of possession, and I will explain.
Indeed, all parties, including the American mediators, agreed in recognizing that peace was the priority need for both sides, though there were some die-hard intransigents on each side. Palestinians had actually made their decision for peace formal and official at the meeting of the Palestine National Congress in Algiers in 1988, when they accepted the same language – right of the State of Israel to exist – that they subsequently used in the Oslo Accord of 1993. That the Palestinian public had come to accept the Israeli state as a neighbor with which they wished to live in peace had already been made clear in the circumstances of the First Intifada, beginning in the December of 1987, which was clearly a protest not against Israel but against occupation, and hence an actual affirmation of the Israeli state and society. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had the assent of the preponderance of Israeli public opinion with him when, in the Oslo Accord, he recognized that peace with the Palestinians was a primary need of Israel, and could only be achieved if the Palestinians received what they would regard as their just rights.
But there was a flaw. Israelis and their American supporters, even those most disposed to peace and the recognition of Palestinian rights, made an assumption that whatever Israel possessed – the results of the 1967 conquest – belonged to Israel. What the Palestinians got, then, would be a gift on Israel’s part. This meant that Israel, always backed by the United States, was the sole judge of what should be given. Most Israelis were convinced that the Palestinians must have something substantial and real. Many wanted to give more than others. There were those who wanted to give as little as possible, and the entrenched hard-liners who wanted to give nothing at all.
Between Israelis and Palestinians there existed, and still exists, a vast disparity of power, such that if the Israelis were to be sole judges of what the Palestinians would get the outcome could be nothing other than a Diktat. We hear often of the “generous offer” the Israelis, under Prime Minister Barak, made at Camp David in the summer of 2000. What was actually offered is much disputed, and the offer too vague, too wrapped up in the language that nothing was agreed until all was agreed to be easily assessed. But in that character of Diktat it could never be accepted. On those grounds, that everything belonged to Israel by reason of possession and nothing could go to the Palestinians other than as a gift, the Palestinians were never actual parties to the negotiation. Instead it was a negotiation among Israelis who wanted to give more or less or nothing at all, and the Palestinians were handed a result of that negotiation to take it or leave it. Even our American President Clinton, who more than any other wanted to see the Palestinians get more rather than less, accepted that centrally flawed premise that everything was in the gift of the Israelis. The result was that the whole negotiation failed. The disparity of power was not addressed, and the whole process was consequently left as an exercise of power, not of law.
Can that yet be remedied? It can be only by adherence to the rule of law. The parties have suffered much more from each other during the years since and are further traumatized than they were during that flawed process. But the ignoring of law can be addressed.
The advantage of that is that it deals directly with the disparity of power, as both parties, whatever their political or military might, are equals before the law and able to negotiate with each other as equals, so long as the international context guarantees the sacredness of law.
Israelis might fear that the law would prejudice the case against them, but this is not so. Instead, the law stands as protector of the rights and vital interests of both parties. Nor does it predetermine the outcome of negotiations. Rather, premising the process on law puts the parties on that footing of equality, and thus enables them to negotiate the realities of the situation in such a way as to come to a genuinely binding agreement.
What has this to do with a new President of the United States? For the United States to dictate the terms of a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians would not only be presumptuous. It would be futile. The parties would, quite properly, defy us. But to set the parameters, to insist that the process adhere to the pertinent international law is within the power of the United States.
A problem here: you must be familiar with those who would use international law as a cudgel with which to beat down those whom they regard as offenders. Israelis who attended a human rights conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 felt that the NGOs represented there were ganging up to club them with arguments from international law, and even the peace advocates among them came away alienated from the whole concept. But international law does not lend itself to use as a formula for retribution. As a normal matter, the international law concretized in the actions of the United Nations is without a police force to enforce it or to punish violators. It is suited, rather, to the pursuit of restorative justice, the restoration of shattered or bruised relations among peoples. Adherence to it is essentially a matter of honor on the part of those who have pledged it, not of submission to force. That is one of the things a new American President needs to know.
Here we come to the question of American exceptionalism. We have not exactly been models of adherence to international law ourselves. Since approximately the time of the Reagan Administration, our governments have habitually treated the United Nations Organization, which was so much our creation, as a kind of interloper against our interests, and have regarded it with contempt. American exceptionalism meant originally that we expected of ourselves that we should be a “city on the hill,” model of justice, liberty and righteousness to other nations. In these recent years we have understood it as meaning we can do as we please, ignoring law or the interests of others when they are inconvenient to ourselves. We have been a poor neighbor to other countries, eventually even to our closest allies.
How should we explain this dismissive rejection of the UN? It originates at the time when American policy, foreign and domestic, committed itself fundamentally to the interests of corporate powers rather than of the citizens. For those financial forces, the UN was an obstacle to their doing as they pleased.
Hence we have another thing our new President needs to know: that the United Nations, much as it may need reform and updating, is not a rival power. It has no jurisdiction of its own, but is a forum within which the nations can deliberate to seek agreement, such a forum as we dearly need. He needs to know that we, as still the greatest power within it, can benefit from it if we are a good neighbor, if we seek not domination but the agreement and cooperation we can have within it if we pursue a community of interests. In the matter of helping to resolve and transform the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum through the instruments of law, which would require negotiation of differences by agreement among equal parties rather than the enforcement of its will by the stronger party, we will not succeed unless with the cooperation of the international community represented in the United Nations. This is another of the fundamental lessons needed for the decent governance of the United States.
Other nations see us now as seeking empire rather than a place of cooperation within the community of nations such as we sought when we first called for the establishment of the United Nations. That we have in fact sought empire is seen in the document that has been the real bible of the Bush Administration, expressing what was its fundamentally imperial intention from the start though it was formally issued only on September 17, 2002, under the signature of President George Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States. It is the basis for our invasion of Iraq and of much else: for our threatening attitude toward many other countries, for our assumption that our allies must simply conform to our wishes or no longer be counted as friends, for our refusal to speak with our adversaries unless they first submit in advance to our demands.
The document rests on two fundamental principles.
The first is that the United States must forever maintain its military superiority to all potential challengers. Last Friday night we heard, in the debate of the presidential candidates, a citation from former President General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who observed that a strong military must rest on a strong economy. We have been witnessing that our government of recent years has frightfully bungled the money and that our economy just now is in chaos. But apart from this particular circumstance, our insistence that we must forever remain the strongest military power in the world is a direct challenge to anyone to trump us. Russia, recumbent since the shattering of the Soviet Empire, has been making efforts – rather successfully with the help of an oil economy that has been raking in money lately – to restore that empire, and has already challenged us in Georgia, where we have found little chance to respond. China is the rising monetary power in the world, with tremendous military ambitions. Our European allies in NATO, with whom we maintained the containment of the Soviet Union for so many decades, have been learning over the course of the Bush years that the United States is capable of being the rogue power against which they must employ a policy of containment. And so that first principle of the National Security Strategy of the United States, in its imperial character, is one that actually imperils us.
The second principle is that the United States is entitled to make a preemptive strike against any, even remote peril we foresee. This too imperils the United States, for what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If we are entitled to strike preemptively against anyone, so they too are equally entitled to strike against us. With this principle we have torn down the whole fabric of the Just War doctrine that has been the safeguard of Western civilization, when we have observed it, for the last millennium and a half.
The thing that a new President must know about imperialism, the doctrine so entrenched in this document on The National Security Strategy of the United States and in our behavior of these last years, is that empires bust. The world is strewn with the ruins of one empire after another, and this is a necessary consequence of their essential structure. The power that seeks to impose on others and to coerce their submission inevitably becomes insupportable to them. They will challenge it and destroy it.
That need not happen to the United States. A country conceived to be a laboratory of freedom and respect for the dignity of man – eventually we have been catching on that that should include woman too – has been making itself over as just one more cheap imitation of the coercive empires of the past, all of which have collapsed catastrophically under the weight of their misdeeds. Let a new President know that this is the route to disaster.
Classically, when the United States was not merely sheltering itself from the misdeeds of the rest of the world in its isolationist periods, it has always acted in the rest of the world in the role of liberator. That we should act instead as imperial dominator is a drastic change in our international behavior, duly noted by everyone else in the world. The link between, on the one hand, our handing over the internal management of our country, in our domestic policy, to the profit-minded corporate interests and, on the other hand, our rogue imperialist ambitions in the rest of the world is also quite clear to those who have learned they need to guard against us.
In the humane ethical concepts, fruit of millennia of reflection on the human condition, that underlay the neglected and dishonored constitutional system of this country, in the respect we once habituated ourselves to show to the decent opinions of mankind, we have an alternative route that promises a future of which we can be proud.